The background description provided herein is for generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art or suggestions of the prior art, by inclusion in this section.
D2D applications may provide a scalable and universal framework for connecting proximity peers. There are different technology solutions for D2D applications, e.g., based on WiFi Direct or Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. A special solution that relates to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is Proximity Services (ProSe) for Commercial and Public Safety use cases as well as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Direct for Commercial and Public Safety use cases.
The aforementioned standards may provide a wide range of configurability for User Equipment (UE) devices supporting such standards. For example, it may be possible to configure a UE into a discovery or relay mode. However, the versatile configurability may also enable a UE to limit or entirely stop the communication measures for all related use-cases, including Public Safety use cases.
On the other hand, the D2D functionality for public safety applications may be disabled due to Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or operator configuration, as well as some special security settings, e.g., where no D2D operation may be allowed for security reasons or on government administration devices.